BELLEVUE, WA – The Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms is pointing to media hypocrisy in its reporting of at least ten attacks involving knives or hatchets, most of them fatal, yet there was not a single mention of “knife violence,” indicating an appalling double-standard in how violent crime involving firearms is routinely portrayed, whether by broadcast or print media.
“We checked ten different reports Tuesday morning regarding fatal and non-fatal knife attacks, all over the country,” noted CCRKBA Chairman Alan Gottlieb, “and not a single report included the term ‘knife violence’ anywhere in the text. Yet pick up any newspaper, read any online report involving the criminal misuse of a firearm, and by the time you’re finished, you will have seen at least one reference to ‘gun violence.’ I can only conclude the media has a deplorable double-standard when it comes to reporting homicides involving guns, yet the victims are just as injured or dead.
“Underscoring this nonsense,” he said, “is the way the media is reporting the Department of Health and Human Services’ removal of a former surgeon general’s warning that ‘gun violence’ is a public health hazard. Gun ownership is not a communicable disease. Putting that warning on the HHS website was just one more effort by the Biden administration to demonize firearms and the people who own them.
“The term ‘gun violence’ was invented by the gun prohibition lobby in order to create the illusion that guns are bad, and that gun owners need to be carefully monitored as if they are carriers of some plague,” Gottlieb continued. “Sadly, newsrooms all over the map have embraced the term, making it part of their vocabulary, to the point that one might find multiple references in a single news report or editorial. Indeed, the frequency one sees ‘gun violence’ mentioned on the air, in print or during political speeches has reached the point of absurdity.
“In each of the stabbing reports we studied,” he observed, “suspects were identified and nobody remotely suggested the knife or hatchet involved was somehow responsible. Yet, criminal attacks, suicides, and mishaps involving firearms all routinely fall within the loose definition of so-called ‘gun violence.’ It’s ridiculous.
“While everyone seems so eager to restrict gun ownership,” Gottlieb noted, “literally anyone can buy a knife, no questions asked. What’s important is that neither guns or knives are the problem. It’s the people who misuse them. The antidote to crime is to punish the criminals, not penalize law-abiding citizens who have harmed nobody.”